Two years after he was elected mayor, Rob Ford’s victory has become Toronto’s humiliation.

Every week, if not day, brings fresh revelations of the chief magistrate’s genius for incompetence. Few manage ineptitude as brilliantly. His talent for doing the wrong thing apparently knows no bounds. Just when you think he can’t do anything more ridiculous or reckless, embarrassing or inappropriate, he does.

So no one was surprised last week when Ford was conspicuously absent as the mayors of the country’s largest cities gathered in Ottawa to tackle urban Canada’s chronic state of fiscal starvation.

While the mayors discussed ways to raise the funds they — no, we — so desperately need, Ford was in court defending himself against defamation charges. And when he wasn’t in court, he was on the field coaching a high school football team.

That’s the kind of week it was for the mayor of Canada’s largest city, one that has pretensions to being “world-class.” Today that ambition is hard to take seriously, not with Ford around.

To be blunt, it would be hard to find anyone more inappropriate or ill-suited to public office, let alone the mayor’s office, than Rob Ford. The truth is Toronto’s pain would have been worse if Ford had gone to the mayors’ meeting. That’s how bad it is.

At this point one thing is clear: Ford must go.

As was made clear at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ gathering, cities in this country survive on a meagre diet of property taxes, user fees and federal and provincial “handouts.” The vast bulk of the cash Ottawa and the provinces spend comes from cities, but urban Canada, which includes most of us, is left with little, about eight cents of every tax dollar.

As Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion rightly noted, Prime Minister Stephen Harper gads about the planet rustling up investment, but leaves cities beggared. What, she asked, will those investors do when they discover that just getting around here has become a costly and time-consuming ordeal?

McCallion also pointed out that those countries Harper courts so unctuously — China and India — are spending billions on the very municipal infrastructure the PM assiduously ignores. As has been noted many times, Canada is the only G8 country without a national transit policy, unless turning a blind eye counts.

Given the penurious state of state of Canadian cities, and the need for concerted action, Toronto can’t afford to have a non-starter for a mayor. The stakes are too high for the city and the country.

Through it all, Rob Ford plays football.

This is a guy who should’ve been a gym teacher — well, maybe not — but definitely not mayor, never mayor.

Ironically, the backdrop to Ford’s electoral success is in part the poverty to which Canadian cities — Confederation’s orphans — are consigned. A community convinced of its own impoverished state is more susceptible to Ford’s angry and accusatory refrains than one secure in its own future.

Making Toronto the author of its own misfortune allowed Ford to win the mayoralty with a slogan as empty and meaningless as “gravy train.”

The real issues the city faces have nothing to do with council or the apparatus of civic government. The battle will unfold in those places where power resides — Ottawa and Queen’s Park — places Ford rarely ventures, except perhaps to play football.

His inability to represent Toronto outside the narrow confines of the strictly parochial doesn’t bode well. This city should have a seat at that table; it should be occupied by someone whose voice is heard.

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